Oxford and the Decline of the Collegiate Tradition

David Palfreyman, Ted Tapper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780713040333
• eBook ISBN: 9781136225215
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For centuries, the idea of collegiality has been integral to the British understanding of higher education. This book examines how its values are being restructured in response to the 21st-century pressures of massification and managerialism.

1

Collegiality Debated

For there is nothing in England to be matched with what lurks in the vapours of these meadows, and in the shadows of these spires - that mysterious, inenubilable spirit, spirit of Oxford. Oxford! The very sight of the word printed, or sound of it spoken, is fraught for me with most actual magic.

Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson (1911)

For five hundred years they {the Fellows] and their predecessors had ordained at least some portion of the elite ... all of them imbued with a corporate complacency and an intellectual scepticism that desiccated change... They were the guardians of political inertia....

Tom Sharpe, Porterhouse Blue (1976)

This chapter sets the scene by considering collegiality as it has been defined and discussed:

• 1. by the Oxford English Dictionary (Collegiality Defined);
• 2. in English literature, and especially within the genre of the university novel (Collegiality in Fiction);
• 3. for Victorian Society by Cardinal Newman (Collegiality for Newman: The Idea and the Ideal);
• 4. in recent decades (Collegiality for Pundits);
• 5. by 1990s participants, the Oxford interviewees (Collegiality for Contemporary Oxford Dons);
• 6. in the literature of organisational theory and management (Collegiality in Management Theory); and
  7. in a model which is offered as identifying the key criteria by which the health and strength of collegiality can be assessed (Collegiality: The Model).

COLLEGIALITY DEFINED

The OED (1989, 2nd edn, Vol. III, pp. 480-3) defines 'college', 'collegial', 'collegiality', 'collegiate', and the archaic 'colleger' and 'collegian'. The first definition of college is given as: 'An organised society of persons performing certain common functions and possessing special rights and privileges; a body of colleagues, a guild, fellowship, association'. Thus, references are cited to the college of the Apostles, the college of cardinals, the college of surgeons. The fourth definition is: 'A society of scholars incorporated within, or in connection with, a University, or otherwise formed for the purposes of study or instruction', and especially 'An independent self-governing corporation or society (usually founded for the maintenance of poor students) in a University, as the College of the Sorbonne in the ancient University of Paris, and the ancient colleges of Oxford and Cambridge'. The fifth definition is: 'The building or set of buildings occupied by such society or institution'.

Leaving aside slang definitions, and the many combinations (including poses of this book is of an organised gathering together of individuals located within a particular building who form an independent corporate body with academic duties. What will be explored throughout this book are these aspects of communal living and working, of independence in governance, of teaching obligations, and of the physical representation of the college both as a community of people and as a very specific purpose-designed­ and-built building with special features.

The OED notes that the term 'college' as applied to Oxford was introduced only in the fourteenth century, citing the 1379 Patent Roll relating to the creation of New College and the subsequent New College statutes of 1400. Conversely, the reference to 'collegiate' in the sense of the administrative structure of a university being arranged, as at Oxford and Cambridge (and nowhere else), on a college system seems to date only from the mid-nineteenth century and then to be used more widely in the mid-twentieth century, judging by the OED citations. A final point to note from the OED, also explored as a key theme in this book, is the definition of collegiality as 'Colleagueship; the relation between colleagues', and the citing of a 1948 reference: 'Decision-taking and responsibilities were based on the "collegiality" rule... rather than on the "one-man management" principle'. This citation from a book on the political system of the USSR seems especially apt in the context of the late twentieth-century debate on the role of the vice-chancellor as chief executive who manages the modern university. Collegiality might also be found, or might once have been found prior to the 1980s search for managerial efficiency, amongst law and accountancy partnerships, hospital consultants, the officers' mess, the keepers of the Victoria and Albert Museum or the British Museum, or even the chapter of a cathedral.

There is a further useful definition of 'the college' in Cobban (1988, pp. 112-15), placing its origins in 'the European collegiate movement' stretching back to the founding of the College of the Sorbonne within the University of Paris in c.l257/58 as 'the most influential exemplar for the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge': 'In its most mature state, the secular medieval college was an autonomous, self-governing legal entity, solidly endowed, and possessing its own statutes, privileges and common seal'. Cobban stresses 'the act of endowment made for educational purposes' as complementing 'the spiritual and charitable aims underlying collegiate enterprise'- hence, for example, some lay colleges are also, in accordance with the intention of their founders and their original statutes, still to this day 'choral colleges' or chantry foundations (New College and Magdalen at Oxford; King's at Cambridge). As Cobban puts it: 'Generally speaking, whether kings, queens, high-ranking ecclesiastics [for example, William ofWykeham, Lord Chancellor and Bishop of Winchester, founder of New College-see Buxton and Williams, 1979] or statesmen, or wealthy members of the lay aristocracy, they regarded the establishment of a college as a charitable and pious venture which would enshrine their memory and which would result in a foundation in which masses would be said for their souls and for those of their relatives' (1988, p. 113). At the same time, however, there was also a vocational, an instrumental objective in the production of a supply of suitably educated clerics, canon lawyers and civil lawyers to serve church and state: 'the fusion of subjective spiritual motivation with objective educational purpose'.

Cobban goes on to identify the key features of college autonomy: the self-governing community of fellows organised on democratic lines within the parameters of the college's royal charter and its statutes, and as supervised by the 'visitor' (for example, the successor Bishops of Winchester in the case of New College), with the right themselves to elect the 'first-amongst-equals' head of house (warden, provost, rector, master or president), and to add to their number (for example, New College fellows are elected and then admitted as fellows on swearing, in medieval Latin, an oath of allegiance to the foundation).' In short, they exercise the sovereignty of the governing body of the fellows acting as the corporation. Also, they appoint from amongst themselves the college officers (bursar, seneschal of the hall, senior tutor, chattels fellow, librarian and even nowadays the data protection officer), and select their students ('the junior members', comprising undergraduate commoners and scholars, and, these days, graduates studying for postgraduate degrees).

Cobban sums it up: 'Generally speaking, English colleges contrived to secure that the administrative burden in internal affairs fell with a distributed weight upon a broad section of the fellowship... The powers of the head of college were hedged around with effective checks and balances, and, in the main, the fellows seemed to acquiesce in this form of contractual division of authority, worked out by the founder [in astonishing detail in the case of William of Wykeham's statutes of 1400 for New College, next used as a model for Madgalen a century later] and developed and adjusted in the light of experience... The combination of the ultimate deterrent-the college meeting-and the operative principle of election to administrative office, ensured that a system of responsible government was [and still is, perhaps] firmly embedded in the constitutions of most of the English medieval colleges' (1988, pp. 127-8).

The sui generis legal status of Oxbridge colleges in the context of the law relating to corporations and of charity law has been dissected by Palfreyman (1996, 1998, 1999a, 1999b). Their legal identity is complex. They combine lay, eleemosynary (created by a founder to disburse his or her largesse on a perpetual basis), chartered and charitable (but as exempt charities rather than registered charities) elements. They may be corporations aggregate or, less frequently, sole (like a bishop). They will possess permanent endowment held effectively in trust for the fulfilment of the founder's charitable objectives and accountable not only to the founder's duly nominated visitor but also to the High Court via the Attorney-General as parens patriae and to a lesser extent via the Charity Commissioners. The head of house and the fellows who constitute the incorporated governing body will be responsible (certainly as fiduciaries, probably as quasi-trustees and possibly as de jure trustees) for the prudent management of the corporate assets as very largely permanent endowment; such endowment to be applied only for charitable purposes as prescribed by the charter and statues and within the regulatory regime of the Universities and College Estates Act, 1925 (amended 1964).

COLLEGIALITY IN FICTION

Consider the dust-jacket blurb for John Dougill's thoroughly readable Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of 'The English Athens' (1998):

Following the rise of the colleges, the literature becomes characterised by a sense of insulation, for the closed collegiate structure led to elitism and eccentricity. The notion of the university as a paradise of youth, beauty, and intelligence led to the so-called Oxford myth and the backlash against it after World War II. The underlying argument of Dougill's work is that the defining symbol of Oxford is not so much the dreaming spire as the college wall, for writing about the city has been shaped and defined by the enclosed nature of the collegiate structure. In Oxford literature the college is depicted as a world of its own-secluded, conservative, and eccentric, driven by its own rituals. Idealised, it becomes a cloistered utopia, an Athenian city-state, a fantasy wonderland, or an Arcadian idyll. Exclusivity led to resentment from those on the out-side, as is evident in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. With the advent of democratic and egalitarian values in the twentieth century, the privilege and elitism of the university has come under increasing attack.

Strong stuff, indeed and territory, if anything, more polemically explored in Ian Carter's Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years which dissects 'the culture celebrated in British university fiction... a culture rooted in the ivory towers of Oxbridge, a culture under threat from the proletarians, women, foreigners and scientists who flood the university' (1990, p. 87). Carter notes that, of some 200 British 'university novels' published 1945-88, nearly 75 per cent were set in Oxford or Cambridge, with over 50 per cent in Oxford itself, and with most of them being detective stories set inside colleges where the murder rate rivals the streets of New York in a bad year. Often they are written by Oxbridge dons, the exemplar for Carter being the Christ Church don, J.I.M. Stewart (thanks to his quintet A Staircase in Surrey- 'Surrey' being a quadrangle of the college). Stewart used his real name when writing his 13 Oxford non-crime novels and 'Michael Innes' as his pseudonym when writing his seven Oxford mystery stories, notably Death at the President's Lodging, 1936, and Operation Pax, 1951 (the latter climaxing with a 'shoot-out' in the bookstacks of the Bodleian Library deep under Radcliffe Square).

Mortimer R. Proctor in The English University Novel (1957) provides a more measured analysis, again noting the dominance of Oxford over Cambridge as the setting for 'the university novel' and the greater propensity of 'Oxford men' to write of their undergraduate and college days than for 'Cambridge men' to put pen to paper. He quotes from Gerald Hopkins, A City in the Foreground (1921): 'He has fallen prey to the first infirmity of Oxford minds- he is writing an Oxford novel'. Proctor thus identifies 'the Cult of Oxford', and within that 'a series of romantic novels glorifying college life' (notably Max Beerbohm's 1911 Zuleika Dobson), which effectively means the cult of the college. Here he makes a link to the Victorian debate about the relative value of a liberal over a vocational education: Newman and Arnold vs Bentham, Huxley and Spencer. Proctor even speculates that Cuthbert Bede's The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, published very shortly after Newman's The Idea of a University, > 'represents a waggish reply to the notion that one's college chums could in any way prove elevating... they did indeed teach him many things, not one of which was desirable' (1957, pp. 196-7).

Similarly, Dougill, quoting from Zuleika Dobson ('Oxford! The very sight of the word printed, or sound of it spoken, is fraught for me with most actual magic'), asserts that: 'The magic derives from the myth, and the myth derives from the literature' (1998, p. 1). Again, Dougill notes the Oxford bias within the genre of the university novel, the Oxford novel typically comprising 'a variation of the Dick Whittington theme in which an innocent youth goes to university with great expectations and learns the way of the world... Discovery of Oxford and discovery of self: here then are the twin themes of the Oxford novel' (1998, pp. 92-4). The sub­ themes for Dougill are 'the student hero', 'the championing of a laddish brotherhood', 'dull, despicable, ridiculous or criminal' scientists, 'cultural warfare between two opposing sets' (aesthetes vs hearties), 'unabashed snobbism', 'drunken exploits', 'social pretences', 'leisured affluence', and 'a fabled land of decadent youth'.

Yet a reaction to this myth, this cult, this 'delightful lie' has occurred; there has been disenchantment, leaving the mythical Oxford of Brideshead Revisited (Waugh, 1945) 'today in a shaky state of uncertainty, in danger of collapse yet sustained by its own dazzling legacy' (Dougill, 1998, p. 136):

For the post-war generation the notion of an English Athens did not seem so appealing, and for the 'angry young men' of the 1950s the lie was distasteful rather than delightful. The walls of the enclosed [college] garden could no longer keep out those who had for so long been excluded [Ian Carter's 'Barbarous Proletarians', 'Barbarous Scientists', 'Barbarous Women', and 'Barbarous Foreigners'], and those on the inside were less forceful in asserting their superiority. The Oxford myth was seen as an anachronism, the pretensions of which were absurd. (Dougill, 1998, p. 180)

Part of that reaction has been the above-mentioned tidal wave of Oxford detective novels drawing 'on notions of an academic Wonderland in which manic professors mix with absent-minded dons in a realm of antiquated customs, peculiar practices and strange language' (Dougill, 1998, p. 202). We are presented with 'a potent concoction' of 'dons, death and detection' culminating in Colin Dexter's 1990s worldwide publishing and TV success with 'Inspector Morse'. But Dexter's view of the University is not as respectful as that of the earlier Oxford crime novel; his Inspector Morse, although cultured, is impatient with dons in their ivory towers, suffering from what in one Dexter novel is termed 'the Oxford Disease-that tragic malady which deludes its victims into believing that they can never be wrong in any matter of knowledge or opinion' (The Jewel That Was Ours, 1992). If Dexter's dons get a pretty bad press, it is nothing compared to the television portrayal of the college bursar: in one episode a bursar is part of a satanic-rites cult; in another he spends much time taking pornographic photographs.

Similarly, Dougill notes that Veronica Stanwood's half-dozen 1990s Oxford crime novels 'feature women detectives, a pluralist city and a determinedly female point of view... far removed from the self­ congratulatory tone and inside perspective of earlier fiction' (1998, p. 235), recognising Oxford's transformation from a university city of dreaming spires to a crowded commercial and tourist city of exhaust fumes, litter and screaming tyres. Hence, 'Though colleges continue to provide a haven of peace in a traffic-thronged world, glorification and idealisation are hard to find these days' (1998, p. 245). For Dougill, then, there has been a welcome and realistic reaction against the Oxford myth, against the cult of Oxford, against the sanctity of the college, and against 'a national propensity for exclusivity and cliquishness'. There has been a 'process of demythologising' which has been 'part of a wider move in post-imperial Britain to shake off the past', and hence the 'rejection of the English Athens can be seen as part of the process of discarding outgrown myths', as 'the Oxford myth of college-bound stories and utopian visions' is undone and gives space for Oxford to be 'reimaged' as 'an altogether different kind of Oxford' (1998, pp. 257-8).

For Dougill...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Woburn Education Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Collegiality Debated
• 2 Continuity and Change in the Collegiate Tradition
• 3 Commensality: Time and Space, Port and Sport, Code and Dress
• 4 The Elusive Search for the Best and the Brightest: Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen
• 5 The Tutorial System: The Jewel in the Crown
• 6 Governance: A Community of Self-Governing Scholars
• 7 Finance: The Well-Endowed Corporation
• 8 Crisis? What Crisis?
• Postscript: The Death of the Collegiate Tradition?
• Appendix: Interviewees
• References
• Index